Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by caitlin macrae

The county clerk’s office looks like the DMV decided to throw a prom, and it looks like that every day. So everyone shows up, all varying dramatically in shape, size, age, facial expression. Some women dress up like birthday cakes, some clutch flowers, dudes of all ages all seem to be wearing suits that belong to their fathers, not quite fitting right, shifting their bodies to fill the space between them and their jackets.

Inside of the office, there’s a giant photo of the outside of the office, where couples can take pictures. It adds to the prom sensation, for sure, but also, couldn’t they just take pictures outside of the office? Especially today, the first real fall day where there’s sunshine and light and just enough of a breeze to ruffle things all artful-like, it is so strange to be lined up against a backdrop of where we are, looking for our tiny mirror faces inside of the photograph building.

Two women walk around the lobby, calling out, “Does anybody need a witness? I can be your witness! Does anybody… Damn, Veronica, you holding me up! Keep walking. Witness! I’m your witness!” Behind the counters and kiosks there is significantly less mirth than in front of the counters and kiosks, where the couples-to-be and their entourages sit on green couches waiting for their numbers to be called. The women behind the counters peer over their glasses while the pair and their witness anxiously sign papers, and even if they don’t have glasses the women peer the same way: skeptical, impatient, like they’re calculating the amount of time between now and the filing of paperwork to reverse today’s.

When one couple’s number is called, I hear the lady-half mutter, simply, “Shit,” which is wonderful. But all of the art deco marble and DMV ticket kiosks and tentative couples is really just a lead-up to the woman who performs the post-paper ceremony, the peace justice I suppose. She pulls you into a pastel room and in two minutes flat is finished, and your hours of waiting and however-long of anticipation is done. But she does something, there’s a weight in her voice, like if James Earl Jones were a middle-aged Dominican woman with the most expressive pointer finger in all the five boroughs, she stares at you in this deep way and asks if you do indeed support this wedding thing that’s happening to the people around you, next to the building-inside-a-building, surrounded by peering women, with witnesses to spare, and in spite of everything you believe about love and marriage and the state you will go all melty inside and say sure, okay, yes.

by J.B. Staniforth

Read part one.

Once in a while Sandra would dump the boyfriend and tell us it was finally over for good, and then a week later she’d come in and explain to us how sure she was that he had changed. No matter how many times she took him back, it was always just as horrible: we could do nothing at all to change her mind as she was repeating to us the plot of every made-for-TV melodrama in history. We couldn’t follow her home and help her live her life; we just had to hear about the aftermath.

“They don’t pay me enough to be a therapist,” said Anthony, a co-worker who’d recently started working Mondays with me. Sandra had just left. “I’m twenty-three years old. I’ve got a film degree and I work in a video store, for god’s sake. What the fuck am I supposed to tell this woman? Throw that asshole out and stop going back to him? Consider getting your high school and training for a new career? I have to stop talking to her. There’s nothing I can do and it’s killing me.”

I kept talking and listening, though, even as things inevitably got worse. Sandra hung around Diana Bar, the nastiest tavern in the area, patronized by a lot of old, toothless drunks so inebriated that they couldn’t walk, its doorway decorated on Friday nights by the blood and broken glass of perpetual fistfights. She told me she’d met a doctor there who was in town from the US, and he was promising to take her away, and even as I asked her to consider why a US doctor would have chosen the Diana Bar out of all the bars in town, she insisted he was going to fix everything for her. He didn’t, of course.

To make her life even wore, her beautiful dog was misdiagnosed by a vet and died on the operating table during a procedure that Sandra told me she learned he didn’t need in the end. I thought she was on the cusp of a breakdown as she told me about the dog, sobbing and leaning against the wall as I brought her our counter-stool to sit on. She was so credulous that it was hard to be sure what in her stories was actually true and what someone else had lied to her about, but her grief was real. In time she got another dog, but her sadness didn’t abate. Finally she disappeared.

About two years later, I’d moved on and was working in an office. One afternoon Sandra came into a coffee shop where I was sitting. Recognizing me immediately, she sat down at my table and I asked her what she was up to. She explained that she’d gotten a tip that she could dance at clubs down south, so she and her dog had driven down to Florida and spent the winter there.

“Where did you stay?” I asked.

“I started out in a hotel,” she said, “But, you know, that’s so expensive. Finally I’d just park in the lots at the beach and sleep in the truck. The beach is perfect: they’ve got bathrooms, showers, everything! And you’re right outside, next to the ocean. It’s just beautiful.”

“Don’t you worry about your safety, though?”

Sandra laughed. “You’ve seen my dog, right? Who’s going to mess with me when they see him coming at them? He looks out for me.”

“You’re sure?” I asked. “There are some real nuts down there.” I didn’t want to make the argument that a dog’s no match against someone with a gun, and anyway I was afraid I was just being judgmental.

“I’m fine, Jesse,” she said with a grin. “Don’t you bother worrying about me. The men in Florida are completely different from the way they are up here. They’re Southern gentlemen! They really know how to treat you. It’s all courtesy and manners down there.”

I agreed that she certainly knew better than I did, though I couldn’t help worrying. She could tell.

“Stop making that face,” she laughed, but then turned serious. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. You still watch movies, right? I bet you do. I saw a movie down there—it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie like that, that spoke to me like that. This movie just… it was just perfect. It said all the things I wanted to.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “What movie’s that?”

“Monster, with Charlize Theron. You know, the story about Aileen Wuornos?”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I just said, “Holy shit, Sandra. That’s intense.”

She said, “Yeah. That’s what it is.”

by Vanessa Hope

Ezra Loomis Pound is Pater Familias to us all. He is larger-than-life, unavoidably flawed, and in this way, he embodies the discrepancy that we identify in all of our fathers—seemingly more powerful than we ourselves will ever be, but still able to be succeeded.

In your vast hands, warp and woof pound into action.
Assembling an entire trajectory, you shine heavy with sweat.
Your hands, bulging with callous, carry generations.
Your very name dictates the lineage.
You must tire of ever aching in those old man faces.
As if you weren’t the cowboy who rode into Europe.
It was empty then. You populated the whole thing.
And the women wept while you were fierce and mustachioed.
Maker, I have barely known you. You have stayed too large.
You are the music box carpenter of the history books.
Everything in you is craft and credential.
Your inventions twitter, but never so much as softly.

Were you still here, I would sit beside you, near the window.
And ask, “Father, did you mean to give us all this hope?”

by Kate Axelrod

It was warm and dusky as Sasha and I walked east on 16th Street the other day. The streets were no more crowded than usual, the north side of Union Square congested with pedestrians and falafel trucks and a handful of women with kittens waiting to be adopted. Toward Park Avenue South, I watched two women struggling beside a building. They wore almost identical outfits&emdash;periwinkle linen pants and white blouses, one with an elaborate floral trim. For a moment it seemed as though they were engaged in a brutal fight—the younger, plumper lady had the elderly woman pressed up against a graying brick wall. She was holding the older woman’s head in her hands and screaming. I imagined, for an instant, that she’d stolen something from the other woman’s purse, or a palette of pastel eye shadow from the Sephora a few doors away.

As we walked closer it became clear that the younger woman was in a panic. She was shrieking in this primitive, frantic sort of way. And she kept screaming—Mom! Mom! Somebody please help my mom! By the time we approached them, a small crowd had gathered, and the older woman had slid down to the sidewalk. She was conscious and vaguely alert, but undoubtedly defeated by some force that had quickly and viciously asserted itself within her frail body. The brush of white hair above her head was damp with sweat, her breathing impossibly slow and deliberate.

Sasha, among others, had dialed 911. She reported the facts to the dispatcher: seconds before we’d arrived, the older woman had been seizing and then she collapsed; she was conscious but out of breath and frightened; her daughter was worried that it had been a mild stroke.

It felt impossible for me to reconcile these two women as mother and daughter, and yet the terror in the daughter’s voice seemed one that only a child in danger of losing a parent could invoke. Perhaps I’d witnessed the onset of some terrifying and inevitable shift—the moment that their roles and responsibilities had suddenly, but irrevocably, changed. And yet they could have been seven and thirty or forty and sixty-five—the terror in that child’s voice, my mom, my mom, somebody please help my mom.

We left before an ambulance arrived, but two policemen came and sat by the patient as she emptied a bottle of water onto her own face and back. The daughter crouched beside her mother and gently held onto her arm. She was quiet but weeping steadily.

by Ian F. King

“I bet you didn’t think that this guy would be coming back to beat your ass, did you!?”

I live across the street from a children’s playground and middle school in Park Slope. The most offensive sound that typically drifts up from Fifth Avenue through my third floor window is generic reggaeton. This was a Sunday afternoon, with the small farmer’s market set up on the shady sidewalk in front of J.J. Byrne Park, families out on strolls in even greater number than usual. The late summer having passed too soon, the air was tinged with a calming chill. The two guys outside the shoe store downstairs apparently didn’t get the memo.

As I heard it, peacefully stretched out reading on the hand-me-down red faux-velvet couch that ties my apartment together in the sense that it’s the only real piece of furniture in the whole place, the argument erupted out of nowhere. It was all softly chirping birds in the tree branches that shade my windows, and the reaffirming whir of stroller wheels on the pavement below, until suddenly:

“Keep on walking!”

“You need to back off!”

“Keep on walking!”

The one guy said “keep on walking” roughly a dozen times in retort to whatever the other guy said. I tried to ignore it, but the sound of potential fisticuffs became too promising to pass up, so I poked my head out the window. But by that time the argument had ended, and it wasn’t entirely clear which two people out there had been fighting. I resumed my horizontal position on the couch. Less than ten minutes later, though, the other guy returned, shouting his fighting words, brusquely displaying to everyone in earshot that he had now lost the good sense that had previously enabled him to walk away from a fight. The first guy, now possibly concerned for himself, began to back pedal.

“Aight man, aight, calm down. Hey, what’s your name man?”

“You don’t need to know my name! I’ve been in this neighborhood my whole life. Go ahead, axe anybody around about me, they’ll tell you.”

“Ok, but who am I going to ask them about?”

” Just axe about me!”

“But how am I gonna ask about you if I don’t know your name?”

The one guy had a very logical point, but it didn’t hit home with the other guy, who by that point had turned around and started walking away again, not having beat the first guy’s ass as promised. It was all the hollow bravado of two middle school bullies thumping their chests until a teacher finally arrives to break them up. And there was me gawking uselessly out the window upstairs, in the proverbial circle that might have surrounded them.

by S.K. Evans

I’m reading Tropic of Cancer. Swaying in a crowded L train car, I’m always acutely aware of what I’m reading and what it might suggest about me, but particularly so when the book I’m reading has a naked woman on the cover.

Screeching through the tunnel under the East River on their way to or from work, everyone will know I’m a bit of a pervert.

The other day, I was lost in a sea of cunts and French whores on a crowded L train at 6:30 p.m. I glanced slightly to the left of my book, catching a glimpse of a small, faded tattoo on a man’s forearm. I looked up to see Mike, the pedal steel guitar player in my ex-boyfriend’s band. I could tell he had noticed my glance, but averted his wide, kind eyes. I hadn’t seen him in months and we’d never spent much time together. He’s notoriously shy. I lowered my gaze, assuming he’d probably already noticed me and decided not to enter into four-point-five minutes of awkward pleasantries with a girl who used to sleep with his friend. I pretended to read, although the French whores suddenly paled in comparison to my own living romantic bookmark; he stared off into the crowd of Brooklynites, both of us moving gently to the rhythm of the train as it passed ever so slowly under the river.

Running into my ex-boyfriend’s band mate on the L train. This is a Williamsburg haiku.

Sometimes it seems I can’t go anywhere in my neighborhood without running into someone I know—or more precisely someone I’ve seen naked. One ex at Enid’s, another ex at a coffee shop on Bedford, a boy I’d been on a few dates with at Daddy’s. This town is a tattered map of my romantic past, a trajectory forever hurtling forward in what is probably the wrong direction. All we do is drink coffee and booze.

I followed Mike all the way down Bedford Avenue to South Williamsburg where I was meeting a friend for her going-away party, occasionally passing him like a go-cart on a track. It’s remarkably easy to pretend you don’t recognize someone; expressionlessness is a perfect camouflage. And you just keep moving.

by Liz Mathews

I remember our first encounter, in early summer when the 14th Street F station was bordering on stifling. I had taken a stance toward the south end of the platform, approximately where the second car would be once the F came to a full stop. It was around 8 p.m.

As I waited for the rush of hot wind that would blow my hair out of place and be followed by an air conditioned train, I turned on my iPod and eyed the other people waiting. Some were tipping the guitarist playing songs in the background, some were reading the day-old newspaper, some were expressing their love for one another with complete disregard to being in a public place, and many were like me. Just waiting.

He was watching his iTouch, totally entranced, his hair in a slight pompadour, black plastic framed glasses squarely on his face, jeans rolled just under an inch at the heel to qualify for the neo-50s hipster fashion revolution, leaning against the opposing side of the pillar I was next to.

When the train blew into the station, the rats doing their dance on the tracks scurried into hiding. He and I—and everyone else—boarded the train. I sat on one side of the car, under the MTA map. He sat across from me, under a poster for storage space. Both of us paid attention to our iDevices. Both of us went all the way to Fort Hamilton Parkway.

We walked each other home, and I discovered that my partner in the commute from Manhattan to Brooklyn lived a block away from me, above the Chinese take-out place. When we parted ways, I did not wave goodbye.

The next time we took the train together, again beginning our journey at that pillar at 14th Street around 8pm on a weeknight, we sat farther apart. Rather, I sat, while he was forced to stand a section of seats away from me, again entranced by the small screen he held in his hand. I read a book, but occasionally looked to see that he was still with me. When our journey ended and the time came for him to cross the street to his apartment, I again did not wave farewell.

Several weeks passed. Then, after a short evening of catching up with an old friend, I was back at 14th Street at 8ish, waiting for the train. The F arrived and I found a seat in my regular area.

As the doors chimed their closing note, there was a clamor of hurried feet, and suddenly, there was my commuter friend, sitting in the seat immediately perpendicular to mine. As the train pulled out of the station, he adjusted his bag on his lap and settled in for more programming on his iTouch. I read my book. It was pleasant and comfortable, each of us doing our own things in the presence of one another. Home we went. I refrained from waving.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen him, probably because it’s been awhile since I’ve taken that train from that stop at that time. But I’m looking forward to our next commute. Maybe we’ll finally speak to one another, exchange names, have a laugh. Maybe then, before he crosses to his side of Fort Hamilton Parkway and I walk on a block to my residence, maybe then I’ll wish him a good evening, and then, maybe, I’ll wave goodbye.

by Vanessa Hope

This piece braids the story of a pair of sisters who ran away from home and that of musician Daniel Johnston. Separation is something that some people will go to great lengths to attain. While others are trapped under its weight unwittingly.

Didn’t ask to be born: didn’t ask to be a medium or a circus
In a gummy sweatshirt, in drawn restraints
With a small sack of lentils, dirt in the nail beds and constant darkness

The only difference between ache and antagonism is diagnosis, and that is simply dependent on volume. On the breadth. The heaving of in versus out and the current it creates. Any building can be full of phantoms and illness. Any group of people can be made to wear a uniform.

On the parade route are vandals
Only out at night—making things like anyone else
Some stir up dust while others drag deep tracks
Everyone (each of us) is waiting for the downbeat

by Kate Axelrod

I don’t know too much about Cuban politics right now, and I know even less about it under Carter’s administration, but a few days ago I met Luisa and learned about the Mariel Boatlift.

For six months in 1980 (between April and October), Carter and Castro struck up some sort of deal, and the United States allowed a flood of Cuban immigrants to arrive on the shores of Florida. By autumn the boatlift had ended, and 125,000 Cubans had made their way to Key West—which was still impossibly humid and stinging with light.

It was late August when Luisa arrived in my office. She was looking for housing and promised she would not be difficult, she would take anything. It was almost ninety degrees, yet she wore a wool suit—crimson and flecked with gold—patent leather pumps and a pair of textured stockings. I still check in with her. She is small and frail, with dark skin and a thick arc of salt and pepper hair. She is missing a handful of teeth, but every time I saw her, she is still dressed with that impeccable, if old-fashioned, flair.

Luisa told me she arrived in Miami in the spring of 1980. She’d been staying in a hospital for a long while before she left Cuba. She said there had been too much going on in her own head, she’d needed some rest. But then somehow Luisa had been offered this opportunity—a trip over to meet up with a cousin who lived in Alabama. Her cousin could help her out, offer her some new job possibilities, a fresh start.

Luisa had been in Alabama for a couple of years when her cousin abruptly passed away. She made it up to New York and has been juggling jobs and homes since. She’s been on the street for a while, but works at a junior high school in Queens, mopping up classroom floors and sweeping chalkboards clean.

In the wake of the Mariel Boatlift, President Carter was heavily criticized as it became apparent that some of the immigrants were actually “undesirables”—prison inmates or psychiatric patients freed from their confines and offered refuge in our country.

In reality, the majority of Mariel passengers were law-abiding, ambitious, upright citizens seeking to simply better their lives. Yet it seems that many Americans could not part with the belief that their shores had become cluttered with Cuba’s untouchables. Luisa seemed to be keenly aware of this the last time I saw her. She limped into my office, smiling apologetically. She had some sort of infection in her right foot, but kindly refused when I asked her if she needed to be taken to the hospital. No worry, she told me, you need no worry.

by S.K. Evans

Billy

“I heard that before Tom moved up to New York he was living on a couch in some guy’s backyard,” Natalie said to her coworker.

“Correction, Tom was living with me on a couch in some guy’s backyard. He was homeless before that.”

Adam

Adam moved back from Chicago two years ago. He lived on his friend Alex’s couch for almost a year. Like a gnome with some bad habits, he lived off of the bagels and whiskey his friends would bring over. When Alex moved to the country for the summer, Adam followed him. He finally moved into a Williamsburg apartment on September 1st. Apparently, he still sleeps on the couch most nights.

Holmesy

It was minus forty degrees in Montreal as Corinne and I stumbled through the snow with a nine-dollar liter bottle of red wine in my bag. We were dressed up to go out but knew we wouldn’t make it much further than our friend Freud’s couch.

The apartment smelled like the stale cigarettes that collected in beer cans in every room. The walls were decorated with Snoop Dogg posters and the halls were littered with empty kegs stolen from bars along St. Laurent street. The dusty couches were rife with cigarette burns and beer stains. We knew everyone who passed through these halls and had known them for years. Except that there was a shaggy haired boy asleep on the couch. He’d been there for two months. No one quite knew how he got there. He didn’t go to college with us. Rumor had it he lived in Jordan for a while and was an ambassador’s son. He was always stoned. For months I knew him as “Holmesy. Or, you know, the guy on the couch.”